ABSTRACT
The self-effacement of liberalism, manifest in Feinberg's study, is peculiar to the Millian tradition his book exemplifies. The first thing that must be said of Feinberg's work is that it is the exemplary statement of Millian liberalism as it applies to the legal limitation of liberty: it is comprehensive, systematic, argued with a rigour and scrupulousness unmatched, let alone surpassed, in any comparable study. Feinberg interprets the harm principle as forbidding restraint of liberty, save where there is harm to others' interests, and these latter are interests that constitute a valid claim to a moral right. Feinberg's account is not saddled with the burden of a wholesale maximizing consequentialism, with all the illiberal implications that creates in the application of the harm principle. In Joseph Raz's case, liberalism effaces itself by way of an immanent critique in which liberal society emerges in the end as only one among a variety of orders in which human beings may flourish.
